


Water, Contrast

by Anonymous



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2012)
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Fire, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 12:25:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2692919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Even before she really comprehends what she’s dreaming about, she dreams of it: Noise, incoherent light and movement, a roar like Cerberus.</i> The things that have fucked up Karai, via dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Water, Contrast

She dreams of fire.

Even before she really comprehends what she’s dreaming about, she dreams of it: Noise, incoherent light and movement, a roar like Cerberus. The memories of it fade, become mottled by the passage of time and everything she comes to learn about fire; the light becomes vibrant flames that are sometimes cartoonish and always terrible and the house becomes supported only by the billowing pillars of smoke — her father’s voice rings like an animal’s defensive yowl, panicked in a way it has never been in her waking life. Her mother’s inhuman dying shrieks echo and shatter the windows. She dreams of her name screamed into the void, muffled by the roar of the fire and the snapping apart of their home until she cannot decipher its syllables and knows only that it’s for her that they call because she knows they loved her.

As Karai grows, she goes through phases, turning over like the waning of the moon, if the moon were always the blood red of a hunter’s moon. She devours everything she can about her mother, of course, but her father is stingy, his grief a vice that closes on them both. She reads, instead, about bombings, about volcanic eruptions, about the burning and pillaging and destruction of war. When she is older, she searches online for victims of immolation, staring at blackened faces and hands and unreal charred bodies until she is sick from it. She watches Thích Quảng Đức burn to death, awed by the perfect stillness of him, and dreams later of her mother, wreathed by her long, beautiful hair like smoke, a lotus flower shriveling and blackening without complaint.

She does not tell her father. Once, she let slip that she had read the autobiography of a firefighter and found its vivid descriptions disturbing, and he turned over the table and walked away without a word — the next day, his wrath had form and shape. He punished her with training until she vomited on the mat, and only then relented, instructing her to clean it and shutting the door behind him with a violent snap.

For sixteen years, the dreams come and go, always leaving behind the hot scent of ash in her throat, the clinging of smoke that she cannot clear even in a bitter winter air.

It is part of their curse, hers and her father’s, part of the fate that Hamato Yoshi wrought upon their family.

Then, Leonardo betrays her — sends her father to the depths. She knows how quickly an armored man can drown, and she moves without thinking, terror in her throat, clogging her chest, making her hands and feet numb. The air is a sweet burst on her face when they surface.

That night, she dreams again of the fire, of her mother’s choked gasps, of her father bending over her to scoop her up — Save her, get her out of here, I will handle him. This time, however, they escape into the cool, endless blackness of the night.

Leonardo is waiting for them. He takes her by the hand. Pulls her from her father’s arms. Leads her toward the ocean, which laps hungrily at the shore. “Trust me, Karai,” he says, dipping her head under the water. “You can trust me,” and the water fills her lungs, fills her stomach, turns her fingers blue, weighs her down until he does not even need to touch her to keep her under.


End file.
